Posts made in January, 2014

New research has found a significant gap in the views of what, exactly, is anti-social behavior.
The new study found that older people were more likely than younger people to interpret public behavior as anti-social.
For example, more than 80 percent of adults said swearing in a public place was anti-social behavior compared with less than 43 percent of young people, reports Dr. Susie Hulley from the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology. More than 60 percent of adults listed cycling or skateboarding on the street as anti-social behavior, compared with less than 8 percent of young people. And 40 percent of the adults surveyed said that young people hanging around was anti-social behavior (ASB). Just 9 percent of teenagers agreed, she...

Individuals who make impulsive decisions tend to have quicker body movements. In fact, even the most subtle eye movements can reveal whether a person is feeling impulsive, according to a new study at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md.
The findings, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, also reveal how both decision making and motor control are linked to how a person values his or her time.
“When I go to the pharmacy and see a long line, how do I decide how long I’m willing to stand there?” asked lead researcher Reza Shadmehr, Ph.D., professor of biomedical engineering and neuroscience at Johns Hopkins.
“Are those who walk away and never enter the line also the ones who tend to talk fast and walk fast, perhaps because of the way they...

by Steven Bengis, David S. Prescott, and Joan Tabachnick
Question
Can understanding categories of delinquency lead to more effective intervention, treatment, and prevention programs?
The Research
In a just-released 2013 paper, Kristina Childs and Christopher Sullivan used data gathered on 1,124 adolescents in a short-term longitudinal study from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN). The researchers compared two models used to explain adolescent behaviors. The first was a dimensional model. This would involve a single underlying trait, a “general proneness to deviance” that would generate a variety of deviant behaviors from less to more severe.
The other was a categorical model, which would involve a...